Unique struggle

This examination of the freedom struggle in Assam is an intense work based on solid research.

WE hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are equal... ," wrote the author of the Declaration of Independence of America in 1776. This was a revolutionary concept. Until then a civilised society was believed to be composed of an absolute monarch, a society divided on the basis of class and an established Church. The American War of Independence and the French Revolution are seen as victories of the people. The changes that these brought to lives and cultures form the chapters of any book on them.

Similar wars of independence fought in the 18th and 19th centuries against the colonial rule of Britain, France, Portugal and other European powers are often written in the format of glorifying histories. Their histories are often of the freedom fighters who died for the cause, or who lived to become rulers of their own people. But the voice of the farmer who resisted the payment of tax imposed on the land of his forefathers, the voice of the aboriginal inhabitant, and the voice of the immigrant, have been chosen rarely as a topic of discussion by history writers. This is one aspect that makes Amalendu Guha's book unique. It is a people's history. Data on the annual consumption of opium per 10,000 people (seers), provincial excise statistics (920-24), and data on land revenue arrears have given the voices of forgotten, unheard strugglers the place they deserve.

Guha's book records the history of a part of India otherwise marginalised by historians of the freedom movement. The story of the freedom struggle in Assam is the story of the struggles against the acquisition of land for growing tea by European planters, the limits set on the rights of citizens to move freely in the name of protecting the tea gardens, the imposition of higher taxes on the inhabitants to build infrastructure to support the tea gardens and so on. Thus, the phrase "Planter Raj" used in the title of the book is a telling expression for defining the historical situation. The ethnic card played in the current regional politics in Assam is a colonial legacy: "Imperialism encouraged ethnicity to play a decisive role and thus hinder the growth of nationalism" (page 275). Facts and figures retrieved from all possible sources are meticulously woven by Guha to bring out logical truths. He has laid bare open ulcers: "Assamese society is still suffering from the pain of these ulcers.... Assam's miseries followed from a system of colonialism" (page 69).

This book is a must for policy-makers, bureaucrats and politicians who are responsible for Assam. For research scholars this book is a challenge and for students of socio-economic history of Assam it is a mine of information.

Guha writes about the socio-economic condition of a crucial period in the history of Assam. In 1826, Ahom rule had just come to an end after a tumultuous period of political unrest. Continuous Burmese invasions in the 18th and early 19th century had ravaged the economy of the region. The British arrived and started imposing taxes not only on land but also on produce from the land. The people protested. Guha defines these protests as "peasant struggles". This is, in my view, a very ideological definition for a group of people who can be called cultivators or farmers. The dictionary definition of peasant is a poor farmer owning or renting a small piece of land that he or she cultivates. In the first chapter, `Peasant Struggle of a New Type', Guha describes the 1862-63 revolt of the Jaintias and the Khasis against house tax, stamp duty, licence tax and so on. These taxes affected not only cultivators but all residents of the area. However, people of this area were never solely dependent on their agricultural holdings. Even today only a part of their needs are fulfilled by produce from their agricultural lands. Most of their requirements of food, raw materials for constructing houses and for weaving clothes and so on are acquired from the forest. They are foragers as much as they are farmers. They are a self-sufficient group.

The same may be said of the use of words such as slaves, slavery and chattel slaves. D.D. Kosambi in his book The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India states: "It is impossible to find slavery in the classical European sense in India at any period" (page 23). This is true of Assam also. First of all, zamindars in the true sense were present only in Goalpara district. In lower Assam there were rich landowners but in upper Assam the availability of surplus land did not allow the growth of a landed gentry. Guha's description of landed gentry is along the Goalpara model.

The Brahmin and Kayastha landowners of lower Assam hired labourers for a year. They were paid mostly in kind, in the form of a share of the crop. These labourers also owned some land which they usually tilled after they finished their employers' work, sometimes with the employers' bullocks as Guha has rightly pointed out. These labourers had enough liberty to decide if they wanted to continue working with the same employer or not after the contract ended. Their social status was caste-determined, which again in Assam was not so rigid as in other parts of India. This social condition was not conducive to the development of slavery. Guha mentions the protest demonstrations by the Brahmin landowners of Kamrup (page 9) against the abolition of slavery but at the same time he says that transformation of chattel slaves into serfs and semi serf-tenants had started long before the formal abolition of slavery in Assam. Thus, the author's view that "slavery as an institution was so deep-rooted in the contemporary Assamese way of life that it took decades... to die out" (page 9), is not convincing. The protests against its abolition could be interpreted as a specific grievance of an agrarian population under an exploitative regime. Could it, however, be seen as a reaction inspired by nationalism?

Assam was in the process of becoming a political entity in the 19th century. For administrative convenience the British called the whole of northeastern India (excluding Tripura and Manipur) Assam. Until 1826, only the Ahom kingdom was called Assam. The parts of Assam ruled by the Koches were called Kamtapur. Jaintias, Khasis, Nagas and so many other communities were allies or tributary rulers. Parts of lower Assam and Goalpara, which were included in the Ahom kingdom in the 16th and 17th centuries, were culturally independent entities. Thus, in the 19th and 20th centuries the Assamese included only the inhabitants of the old districts of Sibsagar and Lakhimpur, and parts of Nagaon district. When talking about Assamese nationalism and the Assamese middle class of the 19th and 20th centuries, it will only be true for people of these districts. The rest were Kamrupiyas, Kamatapuris, Goalpariyas and so on. In such a situation, the growth of nationalism was difficult because loyalty was shared. The growth of nationalism in Assam is best understood keeping this historical situation in mind. Guha, while discussing two-track nationalism, that is, pan-Indian nationalism and regional nationalism, means the inhabitants of British Assam. However, it was too early to expect cultural assimilation of these groups in the 19th century and a strong reaction against the Curzon Plan.

Guha provides a list of individuals and their profiles in Appendix 5 titled "Assamese Middle Class (last quarter of the nineteenth century): A Cross-section". The list consisted names of tea planters and intellectuals educated in England or Calcutta (Kolkata), holding the title of Rai Bahadur, and belonging to the upper caste. As there are only two royal households, the Ahoms and the Koches, in Assam, these were the elites of Assam. It is not clear therefore why Guha terms them the "Assamese Middle Class". They were not a group of people with limited income or professionals. In 19th or 20th century Assam there were two distinct groups of population, the England-returned Dangariyas of upper Assam and the overburdened, tax-paying Dhekeri cultivators of lower Assam. These two groups are historically, socially, culturally and politically different. Guha clubs the two groups together to frame his argument on two-track nationalism. As a result his conclusion is debatable.

The growth of a Bengal-like nationalism was not possible in Assam. Bengal was, and still is, united by a very strong factor: the Bengali language. Assam lacks this homogeneity. The dialects of the Ahoms, the Bodos, the Nagas, the Khasis, the Kamrupiyas and the Goalpariyas belong to different language groups. The dialects of each group gave them their identity. Assamese was always the official language in Assam, but it was only used in its written form and in the court. The missionaries popularised this as a spoken language in the 19th century. So, the zeal with which the Bengalis try to preserve their language identity is comparatively low in Assam. Guha constantly compares Assamese nationalism with Bengali nationalism, but ignores the heterogeneous cultural and social factors present in Assam. In Chapter Two he discusses how Assam as a province is formed by four disparate elements, and indicates the rise of the ugly face of valley-ism in Assam's politics. But his concerns are all for the Brahmaputra and the Surma valleys; he passes over distinctions which existed within the Brahmaputra valley itself.

In Assam, the British also made a conscious effort to avoid the emergence of a Bengal-type nationalism. They could ill-afford to disturb the supply of tea to Britain. The portrait of Assam that the British painted was of a remote and isolated outpost of India. Large areas were marked off on the colonial map as `excluded areas', `partially excluded areas' and `unadministered areas' (M.S. Prabhakara, "Looking back into the future", Frontline, August 13, 2004). They consciously made administrative moves and took political decisions to prevent "malignant infections from Bengal to disrupt the imagined tranquility of Assam".

In 1912, a research society under the name Kamrup Anusandhan Samiti was formed with the inspiration and ideals of groups such as the Varendra Research Society and the Uttara Vangiya Sahitya Parishad of undivided Bengal. Its area of interest included northern Bengal, areas that formed the present-day Bangladesh, and British Assam. This attempt at presenting Assam with active links to Bengal was countered by the British who established a separate department of historical research under the direct control of the colonial government called The Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies, with the domain of its research activities defined and confined to British Assam. Under the active patronage of the government, historical research highlighting the links of Assam with South-East Asia was undertaken. This department was the only one of its type established by the British anywhere in India. This type of effort make Assam's case unique. When Guha labelled Assamese nationalism weak and confused, he should have taken into account the historical factors unique to Assam.

The cream of Guha's book is his chapters on electoral politics in the Brahmaputra and the Surma valleys. Readers may be confused by the present-day political confrontation between the Brahmaputra and the Barak valleys. A line making this clear in the new introduction would have been helpful for younger readers.

The in-depth examination of the Gopinath Bordoloi-Saadulla saga reveals that nationalism was an important part of politics of those days but power was no less so. Facts and figures blend well to leave the reader with little doubt that Assam is the worst sufferer of communal politics in India. Saadulla, the champion of the number game in electoral politics, was revered by the immigrants, while Gopinath Bordoloi banked upon a heterogeneous group whose loyalty was subjective. Guha does not hold any Assamese politician of the pre-Independence era in high regard, and this is clear from subheads such as `Tame Performance of Indian Councillors' and `A Glorifying Debating Society'. He has successfully highlighted circumstances unique to Assam such as the stronghold of tea planters on the local boards. Yet time and again he accuses Assamese political leaders of being close to the British. He codifies this as "loyalist-moderate tradition"; these leaders spoke for Assam but they would publicly assert their "loyal devotion to the British Crown". Guha's loyalist versus nationalist stand has created an image of a historian whose perception has got derailed because of his ethnic or class identity. This he indeed acknowledges in the Introduction to the revised edition, which is under review.

We all know that facts cannot speak for themselves, it is the historian's perspective, the judgment she or he makes, that gives us a history. Guha's narrative is not theorised. Readers will feel the passionate intensity with which this treatise is written. Guha was a participant-observer during the last decade of the freedom struggle. His work has given Assam a world-class history book, based on solid research.